Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray. I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator. Today's Americano podcast guest is Paul Wood, who wrote a very interesting article on all the British connections in the Mueller Inquiry for this week's magazine. It's created a lot of interest, particularly on the internet. And I spoke to him and Isabel Hardman earlier this week on the main Spectator podcast. And here it is extracted for you Americano listeners.

So, Freddie, just to start out, could you explain what the Mueller investigation is?

The Mueller investigation is an inquiry into possible collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.

And it is as vague or precise as you want to be. And in fact, special protective investigations being

what they are, it's become a far more sprawling affair now. And it's looking into all sorts of

aspects of the Trump presidency and, in fact, of corruption in American life in general. So it's

become a very, very complicated and sprawling thing. But in essence, it's meant to be, did Donald Trump,

did the Trump campaign collude with Russia in order to get elected and in order to destroy Hillary

Clinton?

Now, Paul, in your magazine piece this week, you look at the British links with this investigation.

Just tell us a little bit about those.

Well, the principal British link is Christopher Steele, who's a former MI6 officer who was commissioned during the election campaign to do political opposition research. Mr Steele, who's a fairly professional type of person, didn't even know that he was being commissioned by the Democratic Party, but that was who was paying the bills. And what he found, to his surprise,

was some quite explosive allegations about Mr. Trump's sex life, about his financial dealings,

all of which led Steele to conclude that candidate Trump was vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin,

and there were a lot of rather strange, in Steele's view, connections and contacts between people in Trump's orbit and Russians, and that is now, as Freddie says, the principal thing being investigated by Robert Mueller.

But there are many, many other rather strange British connections as a character called George Papadopoulos, who's a young Trump aide, who is, if you believe, the press reports and the Mueller indictment,

getting drunk in a Kensington wine bar with the Australian High Commissioner and letting

drop the rather interesting claim that the Russians had supplied dirt on Hillary Clinton.

This supposedly, or this is the cover story anyway, was what got the US counterintelligence

investigation going in the first place,

that investigation later morphing into the Mueller inquiry. But there are many other aspects to this.

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